Eddie Hill WSM Opry Star Spotlight on Roy Acuff with Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow (April 5, 1957)

Here we present an incredibly rare and significant piece of WSM radio and country music history, an off-air recording of WSM's "Opry Star Spotlight" program from the early morning hours of Friday, April 5, 1957.
WSM expanded to all-night broadcasting in 1956 and soon named their new all-night programming (listed at first simply as "All Night Music") to "Opry Star Spotlight". Named and hosted early on by Tom Perryman, under the subsequent direction of future Country Music Hall of Famer Ralph Emery, "Opry Star Spotlight" would become a decades-long WSM fixture.
In this rare recording from the very early months of "Opry Star Spotlight", 1950s WSM personality and country singer is "Smilin'" Eddie Hill pulling a double shift after his usual nighttime disc jockey duties to host the all-night program. The "Spotlight" shines this night on the King of Country Music Roy Acuff, and Eddie Hill's East Tennessee background and knowledge of key figures in Acuff's early career in Knoxville help give this interview a degree of intimacy and many details not found in many, more "structured" Acuff interviews that have been publicly released. This is also one of the few lengthy 1950s interviews with Acuff in existence - coming before Acuff's 1962 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame and subsequent biographies that greatly sanitized and even re-wrote some parts of Acuff's career story. This rare interview would be used by Acuff historian Gayle Dean Wardlow when researching his notes accompanying Acuff's 1936-1951 Bear Family box set, the definitive Acuff release in terms of both recordings and biography.
As would become tradition over the years, many Opry performers would hang around the WSM studio throughout the night as "Opry Star Spotlight" was on the air. This was the case on this night also, as Johnnie Wright (of Opry duo "Johnnie and Jack"), Stoney Cooper (then-new Opry member along with his wife, Wilma Lee), and Johnny Johnson (Stoney's brother-in-law and long-time Opry sideman) are all recognized in the studio. At about the 38:30 mark, Opry legends Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow, at WSM for other business, drop by the studio to visit Acuff and Hill. Hill, aware of the history in the studio that night, basically turns over the broadcast to Acuff, Tubb and Snow, who talk for the remainder of the program about the state of country music and memories from the early days as country performers.
This incredibly rare recording was made on a stormy April 1957 night by the late John Hotze, then a 16-year old St. Louis, MO high school student. The recording is cut at times, and static can be heard over the airwaves, but the historical significance of this recording outweighs any technical defects present.

Видео Eddie Hill WSM Opry Star Spotlight on Roy Acuff with Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow (April 5, 1957) канала Robert Montgomery